CREATIVE TIME: Tuti Tran

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Tuti Tran, American Cyberculture student at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Occupations

The word sincerely brings me fear as a student with two more years left of university. Despite the economy improving over the last four years since the housing crisis, jobs hunting are a dire process for every upcoming graduates. Especially for graduates with "low-income" majors such as :Liberal Arts and Languages, which has often been looked down upon due to their abstract tendencies. This in turn causes prospective freshmen to pursue more "favorable" career path such as engineering, medicine and business which hopefully will bring in six digits figures when they reach their late 30s. And certainly, this causes doubt among students who try to balance their passion with the demand of the job market. I find it even more unfortunate that many students change their dream occupation from childhood to adulthood due to discouragement from families, friends and society. Today, it seems that everyone strives for the most innovative occupations, and mostly involve with technology - the easiest form of communication. Furthermore, occupation varies with flexibility and has to achieve highest satisfaction in order to beat out their competition. As the job market diminishes for traditional occupations, all products in the modern world are constantly being obsessed with faster, simpler and concrete products. This in turn creates a sense of instant satisfaction among the consumers and contribute to their laziness, which gives the entrepreneurs a chance to fool the mass public. The occupation of today is centralized around creativity, which only brings competition even further.